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A Novel
by Robert Harris
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The day had been hot, the evening still warm. A few villagers strolled in the lane or idled at their cottage gates. When they heard the clip of horses' hooves, they swung around to stare then quickly looked away. Men who a month ago would have swept off their hats or touched their forelocks were now too afraid, or appalled, to acknowledge her existence. Isabelle Hacker, pious Quaker and lady of the manor though she might be, was also the wife of a revolutionary. She stared down at them with contempt.
Stathern Hall, the grandest house in the village, stood close to St Guthlac's church. The ninth chime of the hour was just dying away as she turned off the road and passed through the open gate. In the weeks she had been away rallying support for the colonel, she saw weeds had taken hold in the vegetable garden. The grass around the orchard was a meadow. In the gathering dusk, the big house loomed dark and seemingly abandoned.
Her horse picked its way along the drive towards the front. She dismounted, tied the reins to the iron railing beside the entrance, and without glancing back at Mr Nayler, took her key from her pocket and unlocked the heavy door. She wanted to be done with this man as fast as possible.
She crossed the flagstone floor and called upstairs into an echoing silence. Even the servants must have fled. The hall darkened slightly as Nayler loomed in the doorway behind her. As she went to her husband's study, she heard his footsteps quickening to catch her up. Clearly he wished to forestall any last-minute act of destruction. Inside the study, the air was stuffy. In the trees beyond the leaded windows, nightingales were singing. From a drawer she took a small box and extracted a key, then knelt in front of the safe. She had never read it, but she knew what it looked like. Give it to him, save Francis from the hangman-butcher, get him gone.
Nayler had not until that moment allowed himself to believe that the document still existed. Nobody had seen it for eleven years. Desperate men, in his experience, would say anything to buy themselves a little time – and Colonel Hacker's predicament was nothing if not desperate. But here was his dreary wife, her narrow back presented to him in this gloomy chamber, rummaging through the estate deeds and household accounts and whatnot, pulling out something – he could not quite see it – and slowly rising to her feet.
He had expected, if it did exist, a grand parchment in the style of an Act of Parliament: some scroll appropriate to the magnitude of the crime. But what she held out to him was a footling little thing, eight inches long or thereabouts, like a bill of sale for a horse or a cask of wine, rolled up and tied with a frayed black ribbon. It was promisingly heavy for its size, though. Parchment, not paper. He carried it over to the window and in the dim light untied the ribbon and unrolled it to its full width of seventeen inches. The death warrant of Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, as handed to Colonel Francis Hacker, commander of the troops guarding the King, on the morning of His Majesty's execution, by Oliver Cromwell himself.
He laid it on the colonel's desk, where it immediately coiled up again, like a serpent protecting itself. He sat, removed his hat, placed it to one side, and wiped his hands on his coat.
'Some light, Mrs Hacker, if you'd be so kind.'
She went back into the hall, to the chest where the candles were kept. It took her a while, with shaking fingers, to strike a spark from the steel and flint. When she returned to the study carrying two candelabra, he was exactly where she had left him, motionless at the desk beside the window, his head silhouetted against the purple light. She set down the candles. He pulled them towards him without acknowledgement and unrolled the parchment.
The writing, he noted with interest, was full of erasures and insertions. Evidence of what? he wondered. Haste, perhaps. Confusion. Second thoughts? He began reading it aloud, to get it clear in his head, rather than for the benefit of Isabelle Hacker, who was watching him intently.
Excerpted from Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris. Copyright © 2022 by Robert Harris. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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